On Whether or Not Prednisone is the Devil

At about 2 AM on Thursday morning, as I lay underneath my trusty old heating pad, with my new elephant sized ankles propped up on the end of my couch, moving my legs slightly to avoid the discomfort of either moving or sitting still, with my mind running 12 million miles an hour and sweat covering my skin, it occured to me that the many and varied tribes of internet sickpeople might have something useful to say about coping with the side effects of Prednisone. "Google?" I said, in my head, and with my hands to my laptop, "Prednisone is..." Google suggested, "Prednisone is making me crazy?" And I replied, out loud, "YES!" The cat startled from his place near me. I felt more crazy.



About fifteen minutes later, I googled "Prednisone is the devil" and received over 4 million results. I agreed, at the time. Prednisone may, in fact, be the devil. Why, you ask? Well, faithful reader, I will tell you why:



PREDNISONE IS THE DEVIL BECAUSE:

1. "HOLY SPEEDBRAIN, BATMAN!"

Now, admittedly, I've got some fairly rapid brainwaves. I am even prone to occasional bouts of "randamity." I can make hasty, enormous cognitive leaps--part of that is because I'm really smart (what? I am...) and part of that is because I think really fast. [Let's not confuse the two.] I am likely, on a fairly normal day, to jump from subject to subject with the precision and speed of a lemur. If we were playing a word association game and you offered "banana pudding," I would be able to connect that, in 11 steps or less and in under .05 seconds to the masculine/feminine binary in Middlemarch. [This is why I'm not very good at telling stories.] Now, my normally rapid processes are NOTHING compared to what someone with Bipolar Disorder or Adult ADD faces. Ohhh no. Far be it from me to try and empathize with diseases I don't have :). I'm just a little random at times, and more than a little Type A. On Prednisone, however, these brain mechanics of mine are amplifed to the GAZILLIONTH degree. Example: I had an assignment to write a little three or four page paper on a Keats' poem, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." The paper required no outside sources, was to be a short length, on an easily decipherable sonnet. Piece of cake, right? It's just New Criticism. I can write that paper in an hour and in my sleep. Problems began to occur when I couldn't focus and had to just step away from the paper 20 times in 2 days. My beautiful, logical thoughts were in disarray. My sentences were circular. My hands were shaking. The paper took me a little over five hours to complete. It was only 5 pages long. That's right, after I had already had fully realized ideas, I spent an hour per page trying to make them coherent. I also wound up quoting: Percy Shelley, George Eliot, & Rainer Maria Rilke; and referencing paintings by Vermeer and Jan Matejko. Don't get me wrong, it's a damn good paper. Maybe the best of this semester. I just wasn't able to....simplify, the way I usually can. It all came out a tangled frantic mess of every brilliant idea I had. It was, in some very real ways, a disaster.



2. "LEAVE MAMA ALONE, GIRLS!!"

Irritability, another speedbrain problem, gets its own bullet point for being especially...irritating. I feel like I'm always on the verge of a full blown panic attack. Luckily, I still don't have enough energy to be really, truly mean. I did scream at my five year old for hopping around this morning. My five year old always hops around. It's a special facet of her sunshine-laden personality--which is the reason I felt so absolutely horrified when she put her face in her hands and cried like I'd killed a bunny in front of her. I apologized. Just like I apologized when I screamed at my 7 year old for needing help with her shoes. She's not a crier. She did look like she wanted to punch me in the face. I deserved it. I can't count how many times I've apologized for yelling at my wonderful, helpful husband today. Even though I know this keeps happening and I'm trying to be careful with my family's feelings, I just can't keep a handle on it. And ohhh lordy, is there anything I hate worse than loss of control? No, no there's not.



4. "INSOMNIA!"

I watched Food Network until 3 this morning. I stared at my bedroom ceiling until 4 AM. I got up from the bed at 8 AM. Rinse. Wash. Repeat. X 3 Days.



5. "MY HEART! MY HEART!"

Heart palpitations: they're awful.



6. "MENOPAUSE?"

WHY IS IT SO HOT IN HERE? Oh yeah, it's also on that sheet from the pharmacy.



7. "I HAVE ENERGY! OH WAIT...NO I STILL FEEL AWFUL."

The absolute worst part of the Prednisone experience, from my point of view, is the false sense of energy it gives me. If I am sitting down and all my aching joints are at rest, I begin to feel like I could run a marathon. Of course, my joints hurt all the time and I'm still neither eating nor properly absorbing nutrients. And now, I'm not sleeping either. The result of this special combination of circumstances is that, in a resting position, I feel like there's something I should be doing. And when I try to do something? BLAMMO! I get knocked right back on my ass by pain and fatigue. A fifteen minute trip to Walmart is almost too much to bear, even if I do the 6 to 8 hour fast it requires just to make it out of the house. I find this phenomenon particularly hard to articulate because it seems to contradict itself. It's just a tiny bit like this: have you ever stayed awake for 24 hours and then drunk three pots of coffee to make it through the day? Jitters, with a side of fatigue and nausea, right? Yeah, that's a little bit like what I mean.



SYMPTOMS OTHER PEOPLE EXPERIENCE:

8. HUNGER!

I am not afflicted with this side effect, because, remember that "every bite I take is a sacrificial gesture made on behalf of my daughters" thing, from a few posts ago? Yeah. That.



Some people, though, gain like 50 to 70 pounds on this drug. Combined with the speedbrain symptoms...well, geez I feel really sorry for those folks.



9. MOONFACE!

Sometimes Prednisone makes people's faces swell to moon sized proportions. They call it moonface. No, I'm not kidding.



10. INFECTIONS!

It says on the side of the bottle to avoid people who are sick. I live with a first year teacher and two elementary school students. Let's keep our fingers crossed that I can avoid this one.



WHY PREDNISONE MAY NOT BE THE DEVIL IN A LITTLE OVER 2,OOO WORDS:

Both of these pictures were taken at similar times, in similar light. No editing was done to either picture. I'm wearing only a tiny bit of mascara in both pictures. How does a woman who is sleeping LESS and eating just the same amount go from looking grayish, monotoned and sunken eyed to looking like a paler version her usual self in just 6 days? It's a Prednisone miracle! Actually, it's because the inflammation in the lining of my intestine is slowly beginning to abate. Unfortunately, I have suffered a natural decrease in hormones these past few days which have made my joint pain and GI symptoms worse (something else to look forward to), but by golley I look human again! I look forward to the time when I feel as better as I look. My GP says that will be in 3 weeks for the joints, and some time later for the other stuff.

SO, is Prednisone the devil or not?

I've decided Prednisone, like my own immune system, is both the devil and not the devil.

By the way,

Coming Soon to a Writer's Notebook Near You:

Poetical Ponderings on the Metaphysical Implications of Living in a Body That is Trying to Kill You, featuring ruminations on: self-loathing, destructive power, & hubris at the cellular level.